Ruining a good thing

O.K., here's my critique of the HBO production of Game of Thrones, which one of my staff had ordered, and lent me to watch. It looks great, perfect, some things, like The Wall, so much better than I'd imagined in reading the book; the music was mesmerizing, the opening credits amazing, the acting, virtually without exception, excellent. But but but.

Bob had warned me that there was a lot of "gratuitous sex," and as it turned out, that gratuitous sex ultimately ruined the show for me, and made it impossible for me to continue watching it. Just way too much totally unnecessary sex, nearly all of which involved women -- usually totally naked women -- being thumped soundly from behind, bare breasts flopping. The only time I witnessed what you might call halfway affectionate, facing-each-other sex was in the scene where Princess Daenerys convinces her barbarian husband to try it that way for a change. And interestingly, that was her only sex scene in which she was allowed to keep her clothes on...presumably because they had to cover up the man's penis (still that particular double standard?).

I ignored this stuff for as long as I could, but when we finally reached a scene that could in no wise be described as anything but pornographic -- two totally naked women having sex, in various positions, accompanied by much exaggerated heavy breathing, under the gaze and tutelage of a man -- I decided that was it. I couldn't even just fast-forward through this tasteless scene, because I realized the man was doing a helvua lot of talking, while gazing at his two whores, and when I turned off the mute, sure enough, he was giving all this information that was actually important to the story. But doing it to the accompaniment of this totally distracting heavy breathing. Boo hiss.

Although the show did such an excellent job otherwise in adhering to the book -- one of its many pluses -- none of this beat-the-bitch down sex is in the book, not an ounce, not an inch of it. There is a sex scene between the Queen and her brother, while they are visitors at Winterfell -- which the boy Brand inadvertently witnesses, which brings about his near-death -- but it's nothing like what we were shown on the screen (brother pounding sister from behind, though in her case she's clothed, just has her skirts hiked up.)

Some folks will respond with irritation: well for heaven's sake, you don't have to watch the thing. If someone was watching it when it was being shown on HBO that someone could switch it off and not tune in again; in my case, and that of anyone else watching the DVDs, rather than the original show on T.V., we could simply stop watching it. Which is of course true, although while in my case I could just return the borrowed DVDs to the gentleman on my staff who had lent it to me, and be out nothing, if one had ordered the DVDs, started to watch them, and discovered how much offensive sex there was in it, one would just be out of luck, and that much money.

But here's the real thing, the big thing: what a shame that what was otherwise such a well-done production of a fascinating story that so many of us enjoyed in book form, should be ruined for what must surely be a goodly number of us by the addition of scenes of pornographic crudeness and offensiveness that had nothing to do with the book. If all that had been left out, the men in the audience would be no worse off -- you can't miss what was never there -- and the women in the audience would not have had to sit through so many scenes that one begins to suspect represent the director's fantasies about putting women in their proper place. Frankly, I feel sorry for all those actresses who are forced to agree to perform in pornographic scenes, in order to snag what are otherwise excellent parts. Boo hiss.